The purpose of this document is to
raise awareness of what Firefox is up against in a common enterprise environment.
"Enterprise" refers to companies, organizations, and government.

Firefox is commonly used by people
who have never had to experience the use of enterprise networks. Yet such
networks are used by thousands of people hundreds of thousands of times
over. Because such networks are locked away from the public, it is difficult
to see what barriers to Firefox adoption lie within.

Such barriers include the proliferation
of Microsoft applications, broken web applications, incompetent designers,
and cluelessness in management.

Microsoft Exchange / Outlook Web
Access

One very common enterprise application
is Microsoft Exchange e-mail.

Generally Microsoft Outlook, a proprietary
Win32 client, is more commonly used to access Microsoft Exchange, however
some people use the "Web Access" component.

Right off the bat, it greets Web
Access users with "If you are using a browser than Internet Explorer 6
or later" you can only use the Light client."

Allegedly the idea behind the so-called
"Light client" is that it is supposed to be compatible with older browsers.
However, the Light client provides a vastly inferior experience to users
of the modern Firefox browser.

Exchange 2007 viewed with IE

Exchange 2007 "Light Client" as
viewed in Firefox.

A few things IE gets that Firefox
doesn't:

Preview pain

Selection bar that works more like the
desktop version

Right-click menu

Text formatting

Spell Checker (thankfully Firefox 2
has its own)

And with with Firefox new messages don't
automatically open in a new window - although arguably that is a good thing.

And if you think Exchange 2007 is
bad, Exchange 2003 was worse!

Microsoft Project Server Web Access

Microsoft Project Server 2007 in
IE

Microsoft Project Server 2007 in
Firefox

This is a favorite toy of most management.
It's used to display pretty graphs of all the insane deadlines they have
set.

The 1990s called. They want their
Win32-only Active X back. Supposedly this isn't even "supported" on 64-bit
Windows, even with IE.

As you can see, Firefox doesn't stand
a chance of running this as this is not even a true "web app".

Sharepoint

Sharepoint in IE

Sharepoint in Firefox

This is the new shiny Microsoft thing
that has all the upper management buzzing recently. According to them this
is the web app environment that will solve all problems!

With this product, Microsoft gives
Firefox "Tier 2" support. In other words they snub their noses at it.

Like exchange, even though you can
get around in it with Firefox, there are many "IE only" features. Even
formatting text in an input box is restricted to IE. Despite the fact that
every message board on the Internet has been able to do that in Firefox
for years.

Other IE only features include editing
spreadsheet-like data, and drag-and-drop file management.

Quest "ActiveRoles"

Quest ActiveRoles in IE

Quest ActiveRoles in Firefox

A little something that can be used
to let users edit their Microsoft Exchange contact information.

For some dumb reason it only permits
IE even just for entering a few text fields.

Pages from the HTML CuisinartIt's like somebody put a bunch of
HTML in the blender and pressed the "mix" button! These kinds of pages
are all too common. Because they were developed by brain dead monkeys reporting
their time in 15-minute intervals, who left years ago and nobody knows
enough about the system to fix it.

Other issues

A few other problems Intranet enviorments
have with Firefox:

People regularly link to internal sites
in the format http://site/ instead of http://site.example.com/ and Firefox
chokes on that when a web proxy is in use.

Automatic NTLM Authentication. IE automatically
sends your Windows login info to servers. Firefox always prompts you, unless
you set a hidden per-server setting. There is probably a damn good reason
for not doing this, but in the real world nobody cares, they would rather
just use IE than go through an extra login.

Certs are not synchronized between IE
and Firefox. An internal site may issue a custom SSL authority and push
out a cert for it for IE. Firefox has no easy way to import these. With
Firefox 3 this will be more of a problem as it tries harder to keep users
from accessing sites with unrecognized certificates.

Settings are not pushed out for Firefox.
In an enviroment where only IE is "supported", Firefox users do not get
changes to network settings, security settings, bookmarks, or other setting
that are automatically "pushed out" for IE.

In short, this is what you might
find on a corporate internal network. Don't be like this.